The Guardian: The power of coming out: forging an identity through adversity

There is much evidence revealing the destructive impact of homophobia on gay people. High rates of suicide and use of recreational drugs and alcohol are the potent indicators of their psychological trauma. Yet according to research by Dr Ron Stall of the University of Pittsburgh, having survived the prejudice of their younger years, gay people are more likely to thrive as they grow older. [...]

We “come out” about how we really think or feel; our profoundest loves and hates; our odd and surprising secrets. Coming out captures the essence of who we really are when doing so flies in the face of convention as it does profoundly for gay people sharing their sexual identity with others. Such truth telling is referred to as self-actualisation. This helps us to grow and develop as it means we have removed the mask of trying to fit in. Coming out is the courage to go against the grain.

According to Michael King, professor of primary care at UCL, gay resilience is the result of finding useful survival strategies while facing prejudice. Gay men often keep strong friendship groups into later life. As we age, keeping friendships going is key to our mental health and ability to thrive. And it’s something older straight men need to become better at. Men are more vulnerable to loneliness and depression after the loss of a partner than women. Feeling connected makes us stronger and increases our wellbeing.

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The Sydney Morning Herald‎: Pauline Hanson should be worried about Christianity's decline not Islam's growth

The primary threat to the dominance of Christianity in Australia is not from Islam, or from Buddhism, or Judaism, or any other religion. It comes from those having no religion at all.

It comes, increasingly, from the irrelevancy of the church to most of our lives. By 2050, atheists will be part of the second largest religious group, those with no affiliation, along with agnostics and others of no faith.

According to last year's Future of World Religions report by the Pew Research Centre, they will be on the way to a majority. About two-thirds of Australians identify with Christianity, with those without religion accounting for a quarter, meaning most Australians are one or the other – 91 per cent. [...]

It will be one of a handful of Western countries to lose an existing Christian majority, along with New Zealand, Britain, France and the Netherlands. Unlike the West, the world as a whole will become relatively more religious, not less. Islam will have almost as many followers as Christianity, possibly for the first time in history.

The projected growth in Islam is largely due to demographics – its main populations have much higher birth rates than Christians. The global share of those with no religion will decline, hurt especially by China's low birth rates. Few people convert from one religion to another, but of those who do change their faith, by far the greatest movement will not be converts to Islam. They will be those leaving Christianity and choosing to have no faith at all, a movement concentrated in the West.

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Vox: Why the heck isn’t drought-stricken California measuring water?

Shockingly, California isn’t tracking much of its water. It’s like a business that’s opted to fire the accountants and operate under the honor system, using an abacus and semi-annual estimates from middle managers. A new report from the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California, known as PPIC, says that the state’s five-year drought has exposed “serious gaps and fragmentation.”

California has the world’s sixth-largest largest economy (just ahead of France), and it runs on water. But unless it settles upon some sensible way of fixing its accounting for water, the state will only be useful for shooting remakes of Dune and Mad Max.

Other states are far ahead it comes to managing water, but the climate demands that California sprint to the front of the pack. The PPIC report shows what must be done. If the state manages to get this right, there’s hope for the rest of the brittle West. I’ve boiled these problems and solutions down to a few main points.

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Independent: Elon Musk: The chance we are not living in a computer simulation is 'one in billions'

Elon Musk has said that there is only a “one in billions” chance that we’re not living in a computer simulation.

Our lives are almost certainly being conducted within an artificial world powered by AI and highly-powered computers, like in The Matrix, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO suggested at a tech conference in California.

Mr Musk, who has donated huge amounts of money to research into the dangers of artificial intelligence, said that he hopes his prediction is true because otherwise it means the world will end. [...]

He said that arguably we should hope that it’s true that we live in a simulation. “Otherwise, if civilisation stops advancing, then that may be due to some calamitous event that stops civilization.”

He said that either we will make simulations that we can’t tell apart from the real world, “or civilisation will cease to exist”.

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Politico: The Forgotten Government Plan to Round Up Muslims

In the early morning hours of January 26, 1987, federal agents across Los Angeles charged into the homes of seven men and one woman and led them away in handcuffs. More than 100 law enforcement officers—city, state and federal—were involved. “War on Terrorism Hits LA,” read the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner.

The defendants were all pro-Palestinian activists, but it wasn’t clear what they’d been arrested for. Soon the government conceded it would not introduce criminal charges, instead seeking to deport the group by alleging material support to a communist organization—an ancient Red Scare statute that would soon be declared unconstitutional. The case quickly became a mess, and in the end, 20 years of legal wrangling would pass before a judge would call the case “an embarrassment to the rule of law.” But in the first days of the defense, the lawyers for the men who would become known as the LA Eight were turning over a greater puzzle: why their clients had been targeted in the first place. [...]

The 40-page memo described a government contingency plan for rounding up thousands of legal alien residents of eight specified nationalities: Libya, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Tunisia, Algeria, Jordan and Morocco. Emergency legal measures would be deployed—rescinding the right to bond, claiming the privilege of confidential evidence, excluding the public from deportation hearings, among others. In its final pages, buried in a glaze of bureaucratese, the memo struck its darkest note: A procedure to detain and intern thousands of aliens while they awaited what would presumably become a mass deportation. Van Der Hout read the final pages carefully. The details conjured a vivid image of a massive detainment facility: 100 outdoor acres in the backwoods of Louisiana, replete with specifications for tents and fencing materials, cot measurements and plumbing requirements. [...]

In 1987, after the memo’s existence was briefly exposed, the ABC Committee was promptly terminated, the subgroup and the plan abandoned. But the ideas borne of the anxieties of the ’80s have gained new currency in the years since. In the wake of 9/11, America began detaining foreign nationals deemed threats to American safety—problematic though the legal grounds might be—in Guantanamo Bay. And with every fresh attack, at home or abroad, our demand for aggressive prosecution mounts. It is this fear that has underpinned the platform of Donald Trump—his promises of banning Muslims, blocking travel from countries compromised by terrorism and removing millions in a Herculean deportation scheme. Trump, however unwittingly, has drawn from much the same playbook as the plan once advanced by the ABC committee.

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Jacobin Magazine: A Better Olympics Is Possible

The important thing in the Olympic Games is not to win, but to take part; the important thing in life is not triumph, but the struggle; the essential thing is not to have conquered but to have fought well. To spread these principles is to build up a strong and more valiant and, above all, more scrupulous and more generous humanity.

These liberal ideals, of course, were never really manifested, not even in the first modern games in 1896 Athens.

But the disparity between Olympic ideology and reality has only deepened since commercial imperatives took over the competition. The 1984 Los Angeles Olympics established a new tradition: the enormous public subsidy of private goods in the name of sports. Since then, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has sought some kind of moral justification for its capitalist excess. [...]

But following Jules Boykoff’s theorization of the Olympics as “celebration capitalism,” let’s instead imagine celebration socialism: an internationalist event that boosts popular participation in sports, equalizes competition between nations, and actually benefits the host community.

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Al Jazeera: South Korea: Bee-keeping trend grows in Seoul

"Seoul is surrounded by mountains. But daily life, green space within the reach of your hands is more important than greenery you can look at," he said."

Constantly providing more green space within living areas is one of Seoul’s core policies.

"It is hoped that greenery will attract more bees. That would help to pollinate more plants as environmentalists foresee a dramatic decline in the global bee population.

While beekeeping cannot reverse the trend, it can raise awareness.

In the largest metropolis of South Korea, people have signed up to study the art of keeping bees in the city, which could cast a greener light over a grey cityscape.

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